SELECT * FROM Internet: examples of YQL, a powerful API crawler

December
5th,
2011

YQL (Yahoo! Query Language) is not new, however the concept of a Web Service that accesses Internet data with SQL-like commands, is really cool so should be mentioned on this blog!

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. YQL hides the complexity of Web service APIs by presenting data as simple tables, rows, and columns.

Open data tables

With the addition of Open Data Tables, developers from anywhere can contribute YQL Tables to describe any data source on the Web, making YQL easily extensible. Today, there are more than thousand community contributed tables! You can easily build your own data tables - the source code of already committed tables is on github

Get book info from google books API

Links and resources

Again, you can go much further, YQL is very powerful: embedded queries, create/import your own tables, a lot more APIs (some require keys like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Lastfm). Below some extra resources: